#15 Yesterday, during a discussion of early television on another site, someone stated that it had been weaponized during World War 2. The poster included a link to a site about German guided missiles, HS-293 etc.. None of these were TV guided, though the Germans were said to have considered it.
Apparently it was just assumed that any advanced development would have been the work of the Germans. Completely ignored was the US development of several television guided weapons that actually flew during World War 2, and one that was actually operational, the BQ-4/TDL. If this device had been German, you would have a whole History Channel series devoted to it, along with model kits in every scale and books of every kind. The same is true of the Bat glide bomb, which used active radar homing and was operational before the end of the war.
Similarly, during their lengthy paen to the Horten brothers, the National Geographic channel failed to mention that American Jack Northrop and many others had built and flown flying wings many years earlier, or that Northrop's giant XB-35 flying wing was in advanced development during the war and flew in 1946. They did mention that Northrop engineers had examined the Smithsonian's Horten flying wing during their development of the B-2 stealth bomber. They didn't actually say it was copied from the Horten, but they did invite that inference ("Nazis had it first!"). As a result, idiotic statements like "the stealth (sic) is a rip-off of a Nazi plane!" are commonplace on the net. The Horten Ho-229 was a wooden toy compared to the XB-35, and equating it to the B-2 would take Joseph Goebbels's breath away. Nat-Geo's reckless claim that the Horten could have won the war for the Nazis is one of the most ridiculous examples of hyperbole and ignorance ever broadcast. It was the first aircraft to deliberately employ features designed to reduce radar signature but this alone is not enough to win a war, especially when it is applied to a machine of very limited payload and range.
The Germans did get jet fighters into operation first, but by less than a year. By the time the war in the Pacific ended, the Meteor IV and P-80 were ready for combat. History channel and other claims that these aircraft were inferior to the ME-262 are just not supported by fact. The Meteor III was operational before VE day but I am willing to concede its inferiority, at least in speed, to the German jets. This was not the case with the Meteor IV however, which had 80% more thrust.
Both the P-80 and the Meteor IV had better measured speed and lower wing-loading (hence better maneuverability) than the Me-262. The allied jets' biggest advantage though was a simple one: they could actually be flown on a routine basis because their engine overhaul life was more than 10 times as great.
Other facts the Aryan technology cult would like to ignore (and often does):
-It was the Dutch, rather than the German, navy that invented and first deployed the submarine snorkel.
-The Germans did not deploy a usable radar proximity fuse before the end of the war, more than 2 years after the allies had started using this crucial technology.
I frankly do not understand the motivation behind this Germanophile technology cult. Give them credit where it is due (V-2 etc.), but the constant distortions of fact and the over-emphasis on their achievements relative to those of the allies point to a different and rather disturbing motivation. |
